__________________Stay up to date with http://dukewatch.blogspot.com for the UNEXPECTED and PREPARE YOURSELF for SHOCK and AWESOME on Penny Arcade EXPO from September 3-5!Onebullit: "If DNF comes out in 2010 i will buy 2 copies and send you one."pjVgt regading DNF at PAX:"I would seriously shit my pants and pre-order three copies - one will be sent to Jobi"

Crysis is all looks and no story - that pretty much sums up Crysis, it is a game you get to see how good your computer is.

Not just missing the story either
The AI was horrible... and the vehicle gameplay - not so spectacular. The first time I played it, I realized it played like an old throwback. They had the thing running on big machines in the Alienware booth, and after awhile of watching the gameplay, it even looked like ass on the best rigs they had.

I would say it looks 2005ish. After a certain point games become harder to differentiate in graphics quality as they get better and better. The only way I would be able to tell is if in-game water didn't 'splash' right or an enemy's skin looked a little too shiny. And all of that depends on the game's engine and how far they felt they could push it.

To be honest, I don't think that graphics are that important for DNF.
I've seen some new artworks and screenshots from Deus Ex 3 today, and they look visually stunning because of their art direction. As far as I know DX3 will be powered by the modified Tomb Raider Legends engine. It's not mindblowing technical-wise, but the overall visual design is what makes it beautiful for me.

The same goes for DNF I think. As long as the overall package looks harmonious, I'm sold. Of course better tech is always welcome - everyone would probably say yes to a state-of-the-art engine if they would be able to choose, but I'd be ok with what we (hopefully soon) get. It's what the designers make out of their tech's limitations.

On topic: I'd say what we've seen so far looks like 2007-2008, but we don't know in which state the game currently is, so it's just wild speculations. For example, I think that the D-Day pic looks like if it's been shot with updated graphics than the leaked shots from May '09. Only the Depth-of-field effect is a turn-off imo...

Because they'd be hyping it out like there was no tommorow, as gushing about the 'latest technology eva!1!!' would be too hard to resist.

It's practically in their blood.

"Duke Nukem Forever, where you don't just play the game, you're in it! Yes, you can now actually experience everything in the game, not just watch it through a screen! Have you ever wanted to fight and say the cool lines Duke says and play with the weaponry that Duke has? Now you can. The AI is so advanced, that game feels real. Heck, for all we know, everything in it is real! But don't worry Duke fanboys, the scientists who built this assure us it's safe. Now you get to attempt to do what Duke does, or at least have the thrill of walking around in ravaged LA."

From what we've seen, I think Duke Nukem Forever looks great. I'd say more or less 2010 level graphics. And I'm sure we can expect a crazy level of interactivity with the levels that is simply not normally seen in a game, so it's not just the graphics, but the fun and cool stuff you can do within the levels.

__________________
Location: Just outside the door with dual Beretta 9mm's...

I personally dont care what year DNF's graphics look like, I am not judging the graphics on what was seen in that leaked videos because they were unpolished and the videos were of poor quality, the screenshots on the other hand the graphics look like high end graphics of 2008 - 2009.

__________________
Here we go folks... The rarest creature in nature... The Duketard. I will now approach him very quitely and... Jam my thumb in his butt hole. That should REALLY piss him off!.

alex d you must admit that realtime 3d graphics did'nt change much from Half-life 2 time. And i don't care what ambient occlusion shaders you put in - things won't change much. And that's exactly what i was about. Not about new techniques and features, but about really different look. And that means that DNF would look as any other game on the market.

------------------------------------------------------

By the way - i'm not impressed by new Crytek engine and it's lighting model. At all. It's not realistic, it's just glamourous... (imho half life lighting still kicks ass). I'd say i more impressed by id software achievement of megatextures. They did something really special, when others just upgrade shaders.

Now a word about realtime rendering (i'm sorry guys but i have to enlarge this post a lil). "old comparing to overall computer graphics evolution" means that there are many other things you can include in your realtime renderer. Or maybe change the way you render stuff. And as example there was raytracing. Yeah sure it's damn heavy for modern gpu's, but you gotta start from something. In that case DirectX11 is not a revolution - just another upgrade. So dear mr. alex d - you did'nt get my message at all. But you act angry and blame me in all sins possible. It's not a good behaviour. Don't you think?

-----------------------------------------

Yeah and about DNF. I don't care much about graphics. All i care about is a gameplay. And maybe some strippers It's good to have awe graphics, but it's bad to have it as a main feature...

Crysis is all looks and no story - that pretty much sums up Crysis, it is a game you get to see how good your computer is.

That's exactly the most ignorant and stereotypical excuse that ppl who haven't been able to play it properly, give out.
When they are accused of that like I am accusing you, they always say that they did play it and it did work perfectly but in reality we all know that was not the case for everybody and that only richer ppl were able to do that.
I was able to play crysis maxed out with 40-60 fps 2 months later after it was released when the new videocard models came out.
I have enjoyed crysis as much as any legendary fps game made before it!
It was truly good! It had ambient, it had lots of fun and entertaining gameplay and it's story was presented in a very cinematic way even though I agree it was rather thin, it managed to keep you into the game until the end!
But so what? Why are we even looking so much at the story of crysis? Did duke nukem ever happen to have a cool story and I didn't know about it?
Nobody loves doom, duke nukem or quake for their stories but for the gameplay and graphics!
That's what made fps popular. Graphics first and gameplay second and story mostly never!
Then hollywood fps games started to appear. Games like F.E.A.R or Deus ex, Half life. Games that put more focus on the story than before!
For a fps game, there should be Graphics, Gameplay and cool music and sfx because in the end immersion and ambient are the things that make any game memorable! If you have immersion in a game with a lame ambient you fail. If you have a cool ambient and you fail to immerse people in it you fail again. The idea is to immerse people into a cool ambient to win!
Crysis had imersion because if it's "OMG" graphics, it had a cool ambient in that tropical area with aliens and soldiers roaming everywhere, it had cool gameplay mechanics with that suit, the weapons in the game looked and acted cool and the music was decent, wouldn't say memorable but it wasn't bad!
So why did this game fail at a perception level?
Well it did because of the same reason for which Gta4(another epic game) failed! Because these games were state of the art technology that pushed one's pc to the max and can still do it to this day and lots and lots of people bashed it because they couldn't enjoy it properly at the time of release and even a few years after it's release!
The incredible amounts of frustration crysis and gta4 have both created to people, have spawned a trend where everybody that couldn't play it would post on game forums or game sites and bash these 2 games with the same old stereotypical shit up to the point where they even indoctrinated people that could play this game, that this game is bad!
Even I almost fell for it when everybody was saying it's badly optimized it doesn't have this doesn't have that blah blah blah.
Once I got my gaming rig up and running, I enjoyed crysis at it's real value!

I don't think DNF's graphics will be a problem. After all, whoever is or will pick up the project again, the Unreal Engine allows for easy tweaking/upgrading of any aspect that feels off or outdated in some way or another. I trust the developers on that one, now matter how long it takes.

Besides, I don't think Duke will be a game with a marketing strategy based on technical improvement (like Crysis). Like those who've actually played it have been saying, it'll be all about Duke, his ego, babes, and an awesome style and atmosphere that cannot be found in any other game on the market (well other than Duke 3D, that is)!

alex d you must admit that realtime 3d graphics did'nt change much from Half-life 2 time. And i don't care what ambient occlusion shaders you put in - things won't change much. And that's exactly what i was about. Not about new techniques and features, but about really different look. And that means that DNF would look as any other game on the market.

What exactly do you mean by "really different look"? So called "realistic" rendering techniques using shaders and rasterization have exactly the same "look" as the ray tracing techniques you're lauding up, the only difference is in quality not "looking different." If you compare things from HL2 to now, you'll see major changes in how things are done.

Shaders, being the programmable pipeline they are, allow coders to make their games look as similar or as different to the norm as they please. If they used completely "revolutionary" methods of coding a rendering engine it would still be pretty much exactly the same as otherwise in terms of "looks," just not in quality nor performance. We're at the stage where games look the same because developers want them to look like that, not because of restrictive fixed-function API's like back in the days of the GeForce 4.

For example, in my engine I've got a shader set up to give a ton of different visual styles by just passing an Attributemap texture as a parameter. Just changing the texture and my projects can change from being shaded with a "genericly realistic" Lambertian style to a fully NPR cel-shaded look. These are as "different" looks as you can get and they're using a single shader, doesn't even require any so called "upgrading" to achieve.

Quote:

By the way - i'm not impressed by new Crytek engine and it's lighting model. At all. It's not realistic, it's just glamourous... (imho half life lighting still kicks ass). I'd say i more impressed by id software achievement of megatextures. They did something really special, when others just upgrade shaders.

Hate to break it to you but MegaTexturing is just a further extension of the Clip Mapping technique for reducing mipmap data and the Texture Atlas Streaming concept, along with plenty of "upgraded" shader wizardry for figuring out the correct mip-levels and texture coordinates. Have you read any of the papers detailing the technique? They're well worth the read, as are Crytek's papers on Light Volume Propagation.

As far as I'm concerned, LVP is a far greater step forward in real time rendering techniques than MegaTexturing. MegaTexturing was an incremental step forward while LVP is a very novel way of simulating ray-traced style global illumination lighting in a rasterized renderer while maintaining performance on DX9 level kit.

For all intents and purposes it's a completely dynamic hybrid Rasterizer/Ray-Tracer calculating full global illumination every frame in realtime, which is much closer to the "something completely different" ray-tracing you're demanding than the pre-processed static lightmapping of HL2. When it was released, HL2's lighting model was far, far closer to that of HL1 than it is to modern Deferred/Inferred Renderers. It wasn't until Ep2 came out that they actually got a decent renderer in the engine.

Quote:

Now a word about realtime rendering (i'm sorry guys but i have to enlarge this post a lil). "old comparing to overall computer graphics evolution" means that there are many other things you can include in your realtime renderer. Or maybe change the way you render stuff. And as example there was raytracing. Yeah sure it's damn heavy for modern gpu's, but you gotta start from something. In that case DirectX11 is not a revolution - just another upgrade. So dear mr. alex d - you did'nt get my message at all. But you act angry and blame me in all sins possible. It's not a good behaviour. Don't you think?

Anger? Blame? Putting emphasis behind one's point isnt any indication of anger. Any anger or blame you gleaned from my post is just in your head. I also never said DX11 was completely revolutionary, I was merely pointing out that it is a big step forward compared to what came before and not stuck in the mud like you were claiming. As such, it seems clear that you were the one to miss my point, my friend. So, I'll repeat the point for you:

It is completely and utterly irrelevent to compare the progress of realtime and non-realtime graphics development as the two situations have nothing in common! Ofcourse people can develop utterly revolutionary and unique rendering methods for non-realtime purposes pretty damn quickly as they have no worries what so ever about the performance of such techniques. They can leave each individual frame rendering on a server farm for months if they need to, which they often do.

The demands of realtime rendering, especially in games where the processors are occupied by other performance critical systems, requires each frame to be rendered a matter of milliseconds and quite often more than once. This is the reason why the greatest engine-coding minds in the world like Carmack, Sweeny and the Crytek guys can "only upgrade a few shaders" and not give you something which looks "completely different" using a completely new rendering method not rooted in already established tech.

It's not like people aren't developing these new methods, it's the fact that they're [/i]simply not possible in realtime game situations yet[/i]. Id Software are actively persuing Ray-Casting through Sparse Voxel Octrees for their next engine (idTech 6), but that's not looking likely to go anywhere productive until near the end of the decade atleast. Even ignoring the whole processing power issues and ignoring that it's very difficult to have dynamic geometry, the size of the data-sets currently required for a single, relatively tiny scene range in the terrabytes! I'm in love with the technique, but damn is it a huge step backwards on current hardware compared to what's possible with the "boring old" rasterization shaders.

Further more, your whole arguement against DX11 seems to be alongs the lines that it's holding developers back from making their own unique rendering paths and escaping the restrictions of rasterisation. That's far from the case as it's yet another step closer to fully programmable GPU's of the style which Larabee was meant to be.

Eventually, yes, there will be plenty enough power (and more importantly memory bandwidth) in these GPU's to handle such tasks as fully-raytraced scenes but not right now. Sure it's a "start" as you say, but a "start" is no use for a commercial game if it's lower-quality and more resource-intensive at a lower frame-rate with far more static pieces of environment than the "standard" option.

Basically, what you're saying makes very little sense at all in terms of what you're talking about. You say you want progress and for games not to look the same as they have been for years, yet you're utterly unimpressed with the major steps forward across the industry and are loudly demanding they switch to techniques which would set the industry back a decade in capability.

Unless you mean you would prefer games to have lower quality visuals with lower performance just for the sake of having some revolutionary new way of it being drawn to the screen? That would make sense even if it isn't exactly a realistic point of view as "how" it's drawn to the screen won't effect you, the gamer, at all.

Using established techniques which the developers are very familiar with means they can give you a lot higher quality a product than if they were to use a brand new technology using utterly revolutionary techniques they have never used before and don't know how on earth to do what they want with it.

I dont`t care bout the graphics - I have a 2006 IMAC with bootcamp so I wouldn`t run DNF if I could anyway (however I will buy either new PC or a X360 if DNF will ever get published - I am smarter now from the DNT lesson). Im still playing Wolfenstein 3D and ROTT so for me most important is:

1. hi-res (like 640x480 because 320x240 is blurry on large maps)
2. enemies distinguishable from other objects
3. doors/switches distinguishable from other walls

alex d you can't get a simple thing dude. Completely different look can't be achieved RIGHT NOW. You must read something before posting.

And no one compared real time techniques with non-realtime dude. I said exactly that someone could use some of modern non-realtime rendering concepts in they realtime applications (and that means you have to THINK how to do that and maintain good FPS).

And so, i say DNF will look just as good as any other game on the market. Yes, new Crysis have some neat deffered renderer which i don't like actually. Yes, new game from Id will bring a world-texturing revolution, which i like, cuz it gives some very special look to overall realtime (and it will impact non-realtime too) graphics. BUT NO DAMN GAME will bring us completely different look till we get some actual raytracing realtime techniques. And that's it dude. If you did'nt get it - then i can't help you.

By the way such giants as Id and Crytek always think about new tech's and implemet them. Small developers (as you are i think) can't afford such waste of time and maybe money (if your awesome graphics will burn all known gpu's in 5 seconds). So actually i'd better bet on Id then on Gearbox to bring us new rendering tech. By the way - do you thing Gearbox will handle top-level graphics for DNF? (as for me - i don't give a sh*t. cuz i'd play DNF even in 2d as i said before).

2 Dukefan24: agree. Game is a gameplay. By the way - DN3D was'nt completely 3d, so what? It's still awesome.

2 DarkDuke: Crysis and GTAIV was average cuz of gameplay. Actually i played Sin (remember that?) with about 15 to 20 fps and i enjoyed it much. And i played Blood (first) with 20 fps too (earlier). So what? And i still love those games. But i don't want to install Crysis again (and GTAIV). By the way GTA SanAndreas was gpu-hungry too. But i'm still playing it sometimes cuz it was a masterpiece. So, dude, i think you're wrong. Imho.

That's exactly the most ignorant and stereotypical excuse that ppl who haven't been able to play it properly, give out.

Nope.
I can run Crysis maxed smoothly... but the game is weak. It's got fantastic visuals, but the story is crap, characters are paper thin... gameplay is your same standard FPS gameplay we've been playing for years.

And before someone tries to throw the "sandbox level design!!" at me, it's not. Crysis is a level to level progression game that gives you a feeling of freedom, when really it's still a confined game. Each level gives you multiple paths to a single goal... but it's not a true sandbox title.

Crysis was... a disappointment. Even Crytek knows they botched the story and have hired outside help to to the story for Crysis 2.

BUT... this is about DNF, so... lets get back to DNF discussion and leave Crysis out of this.

alex d you can't get a simple thing dude. Completely different look can't be achieved RIGHT NOW. You must read something before posting.

And no one compared real time techniques with non-realtime dude. I said exactly that someone could use some of modern non-realtime rendering concepts in they realtime applications (and that means you have to THINK how to do that and maintain good FPS).

And so, i say DNF will look just as good as any other game on the market. Yes, new Crysis have some neat deffered renderer which i don't like actually. Yes, new game from Id will bring a world-texturing revolution, which i like, cuz it gives some very special look to overall realtime (and it will impact non-realtime too) graphics. BUT NO DAMN GAME will bring us completely different look till we get some actual raytracing realtime techniques. And that's it dude. If you did'nt get it - then i can't help you.

By the way such giants as Id and Crytek always think about new tech's and implemet them. Small developers (as you are i think) can't afford such waste of time and maybe money (if your awesome graphics will burn all known gpu's in 5 seconds). So actually i'd better bet on Id then on Gearbox to bring us new rendering tech. By the way - do you thing Gearbox will handle top-level graphics for DNF? (as for me - i don't give a sh*t. cuz i'd play DNF even in 2d as i said before).

2 Dukefan24: agree. Game is a gameplay. By the way - DN3D was'nt completely 3d, so what? It's still awesome.

2 DarkDuke: Crysis and GTAIV was average cuz of gameplay. Actually i played Sin (remember that?) with about 15 to 20 fps and i enjoyed it much. And i played Blood (first) with 20 fps too (earlier). So what? And i still love those games. But i don't want to install Crysis again (and GTAIV). By the way GTA SanAndreas was gpu-hungry too. But i'm still playing it sometimes cuz it was a masterpiece. So, dude, i think you're wrong. Imho.

You have the real artistic eye, but the inferior English, Otto - I agree with what you're saying, and I think Crysis looks like poop. What do you think of Tomb Raider: Underworld's lighting?

Well either way, I still think it's stupid to decide "what year" Duke will look like. It's been said countless times by programmers, game developers, and George himself that most of the stuff in any modern game can be upgraded fairly easily.

Most of all, no two games ever look the same in any given year unless they are sharing an engine. Doom 3 and Half Life 2 both came out in 2004, two of my favorite games, and they looks nothing alike. Doom I think had superior shadowing, ambient lighting and edges, while Half Life obviously was way ahead of it's time with physics, reflective lighting, and environment interaction.

__________________
RAWR! I'm in the Duketard Guild, because I am a lvl 70 bad ass. "Eat shit and die!"

They release budget titles all the time with dated graphics. Sometimes the gameplay is good. Let's just hope it doesn't happen with DNF... The fact is that people buy the eye-candy more than anything else.

That being said, no comment on Underworld? The lighting is extremely nice, and overall the graphics are nice too.

That's exactly the most ignorant and stereotypical excuse that ppl who haven't been able to play it properly, give out.
When they are accused of that like I am accusing you, they always say that they did play it and it did work perfectly but in reality we all know that was not the case for everybody and that only richer ppl were able to do that.

LOL, don't pride yourself to much. I work at Wal-mart, and even I was able to build my own computer off of newegg.com that could run Crysis at the highest settings. I'd respect your opinion if you weren't getting so emotionally attached to it. Face it, the game sucked.

__________________
RAWR! I'm in the Duketard Guild, because I am a lvl 70 bad ass. "Eat shit and die!"

I think it will look OK. But lets be realistic, it's not coming out until at least 2011/2012, by that time the tech will be over 4 years old. I think any chance of this game blowing all other games out of water has gone. I think it could still be a good game, but a great game - nope. 3 or 4 years is a looooong time in game development,

No reason to freeze, as we have time to trickle in features until the game ships. But it's complete enough now that we could ship with no excuses and be happy. But just like in Duke 3D, when that engine was done, we still added small features like slopes and went back and retrofit the levels. We will still add things to the engine, as we can, where they make sense, and most importantly - where they won't delay us. We will add things if they are cool and don't impact things, but we will not add features that will cause big delays or mass reworking of exisiting content.
Also you guys (and make note of this), should not get overly excited. My talking does not mean you will see the game "soon". Don't read anything into my statements.

- George Broussard, January 17, 2004.

Quote:

Think 1) we're sufficiently advanced so as to not look dated when we ship and 2) we will continue to add features until we ship. But they are all fluff features. We have enough to ship now, and that's a great thing for development because we can make the game with no excuse like "We need X to do Y". We don't really have any unknowns right now. We just have a lot of work to do.

- George Broussard, February 17, 2004.

Quote:

Don't worry. When I say tech complete, I mean we could ship if all the content were done.
It's fairly easy to add and update shaders and we do so all the time.
The graphics guys are ahead and always have time to add in bells and whistles.
Many things like per pixel blur, depth of field etc, have zero impact on game content and drop in, in a few days.

- George Broussard, March 30, 2006.

Quote:

Unreal. I believe we branched off somewhere around the Unreal 2 time when they added static meshes. Since then we've redone the rendering 100% and it's a fully modern engine.

I couldn't resist. Too hilarous. first quote, looks like they did everything they said they wouldn't.

__________________
"Ever since I was a little boy, dressing up has always been...my greatest joy. But when It's time to be discreet, there is one thing you just can't beat and that's a strapless backless classical little black dress"